Zeynep Talay

To varying degrees the philosophical problem of self-deception has occupied philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche. Do we deceive ourselves or not? If so, in what circumstances do we deceive ourselves or let some others deceive us? What consequences may it have? Is it something that we should avoid or can it have positive consequences for the person? Such questions find many of their answers in a debate between intentionalist and non-intentionalist theories. However, I distinguish here between the cognitive and the ethical aspect of the problem, argue that this distinction has not been respected as much as it might have been in recent philosophy, and explore the ways in which literary treatments of self-deception may help us to distinguish its ethical dimension more clearly. By ethics I refer both to the relationship of self and other and to that of self to self.

Much of Nietzsche’s work questions modes of thought, notably Platonism, that posit a dualism between a true world outside time and an apparent world of change, becoming, and semblance. It also raises doubts about a sharp separation between philosophy and literature.1Many have followed Nietzsche’s lead, seen philosophy’s modes of generalization and conceptualization as limited resources for the understanding of human conduct, and turned to literature. Thinkers as different from one another as D. Z. Phillips and Martha Nussbaum and post-Nietzschean philosophers like Derrida, Bataille, and Blanchot have turned to literature for accounts of ethical experience in general and, in particular, for an understanding of what..

While discussions of the debate between Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg over ‘secularisation’ focus primarily on the methodological utility of the concept, the difference between them was also one of the philosophical commitments and substantive claims about modernity. This difference is not always obvious. One way of bringing it out is to address the different contexts in which they produced their most famous statements about secularisation. But another, and one that will be pursued here, is to consider the critical dialogue that both thinkers engaged in with Nietzsche. Put briefly, while Löwith thought that Nietzsche misunderstood the ancients, Blumenberg thought that he misunderstood the moderns. For Löwith, Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return is not Greek, but an aggressive countergospel that owes much to the Christian culture it seeks to oppose; for Blumenberg, Nietzsche assumes, wrongly, that the self-belittlement of man by theology has been succeeded by the self-belittlement of man by science. In addition, Blumenberg – unlike both Nietzsche and Löwith – thinks that he can mount a robust defence of both modern science and progress.